jACQUELINE ROSE'S MoTHERS: AN ESSAY ON LOVE AND CRUELTY (AND ON FIRST LOOKING INTO SHEILA HETI'S MOTHERHOOD)

When a book disappoints, is it the author’s fault or the reader’s?

Two of the most brilliant critical-theoretical works I read in university were Jacqueline Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath and The Case of Peter Pan. Blending poststructuralist theory, feminist politics, and attentive close readings, Rose composed complex yet lucid analyses. I hadn’t kept up with her books after Sexuality in the Field of Vision, but she’s gone on to write on a range of socio-political as well as literary topics, sometimes merging pop cultural and high cultural analysis.

Haerper’s excerpt from this new book was provocative and interesting: I looked forward to n analysis that tackled mothering from a fresh angle, including welcome attention to adoptive mothers, like Rose herself.

But this is a puzzling book, perhaps too obviously the extension of a published essay from a couple of years ago that Rose was urged to turn into a full-length work. It’s a perfectly competent elucidation of how motherhood is depicted: in the media, in literature, and in psychoanalysis. Rose is erudite and her writing is generally clear, although a handful of passages would have benefited from more expert editing. Rose deftly reviews the literature of motherhood, and she includes some less familiar international examples among her mentions of Medea and Beloved, of Plath and Rich and Elena Ferrante’s fiction. And Rose is admirably attentive to race, class and nationhood, although these discussions feel, sometimes, like asides, given her more sustained engagement with western works and examples.

A few examples feel exceptionally dated, as in her mention of Attorney General candidate Zoe Baird, disqualified by virtue of her employment of a nanny without legal authorization to work in the U.S.—way back during the Clinton Administration. While Rose cites this as an example of ongoing conflicted and exploitative relationships between white mothers and caregivers who are women of colour, there are far more recent examples—factual and fictional—that could be analyzed. These relationships have only grown more complicated. A very recent must-read complicates the racial politics: French-Moroccan novelist Leïla Slimani’s chilling The Perfect Nanny, would have made a fascinating counterpoint.

Rose is a sympathetic observer of how mothers have been constructed—alternately idealized and vilified—and she brings, invariably, a bracing level of rigour to her wide-ranging and sometimes meandering discussion. Yet she has surprisingly little to say about the relationship between biological and social-cultural dimensions of mothering, including adoptive mothering and alternate forms of (not necessarily legally recognized) mother-child affiliations and relationships.

I had hoped to share this book with friends whose children came into their lives through fostering and adoption, but there is little here about Rose’s own experience, even in the last chapter of the book where she describes some tetchy encounters with social workers and border guards, intent, respectively, on policing her parenting and the nation’s composition.

Rose may be understandably protective of her now-adult child’s privacy; she is notably less guarded in her loving recollections of her late sister Gillian Rose, a brilliant social philosopher. For a critic as astute as Rose in dissecting public/private divides, the absence here of a more personal reflection about motherhood raises questions about what we still cannot say or name as part of our own experience.

And yet the genre of motherhood literature is now so capacious that it includes dissections of choosing whether to have children—most recently in Sheila Heti’s apparently auto-fictional Motherhood, which is garnering a lot of attention. Here’s an excerpt.

Heti addresses many of the same issues Rose brings up, but from a much more personal—even solipsistic—perspective. The narrator bemoans her friends’ preoccupation with the new lives they are nurturing and weighs the benefits and disadvantages of motherhood from the vantage point of her relationship with a man who has a child from a previous relationship and is not eager to have another. The narrator’s mother struggled with depression when her own children were younger, seeking solace in a fairly radical form of solitude.

The trouble, for me at least, with Heti’s approach, is that unlike her previous autobiographically-inspired novel, How Should a Person Be?, the underlying question that propels the narrative is not very compelling. In the earlier work, the narrator conveyed a sense of existential urgency: how to make herself into an adult, into a writer? Here Heti’s narrator worries about forsaking art for childcare, and she circles around the question of whether women can be both creative and procreative, comparing, for example, her religious cousin’s six children and her own six books. But to what end? The book’s endless conversations and soliloquys return to the question of motherhood time and again without really advancing the discussion. There are no substantial breakthroughs, at least thus far (I have not finished the book; I am having difficulty persevering).

Both Heti and Rose write as if readers have an inherent investment in their explorations of motherhood. What I’m looking for is a reason to keep reading: new insights, startling comparisons, unfamiliar examples.

For a break, I picked up an Alice Munro story, “The Children Stay.” It’s unfair to compare other writers—any writers—to Munro. But she says more here about motherhood’s responsibilities and betrayals, the conflicting claims of sex and love and creativity, than I found in either of the two books I’ve been reading. How does she do that?

Does fiction offer possibilities for writing about mothers that are not accessible in non-fiction, where, with rare exceptions, ambiguity and ambivalence are difficult to confess? (And is Heti’s Motherhood fiction? Is Heti inviting us to judge her narrator’s narcissism, not sympathize with it? Beats moi.)

As I turn back to Munro research this spring, with a focus on mourning mothers, I’ll keep reading all of the new motherhood books. These, though, are not quite what I’d hoped for from such accomplished and interesting authors.